“I think at this point he’s obsessed with being on Mount Rushmore.” (Image by Lbertman.)

Cornell West is critical of President Obama in a new Financial Times interview, for a myriad of reasons. I think when all is done health-care reform, should it survive the Supreme Court, will have a monumental positive effect on wealth distribution and equity in this country. It will do more for Americans than all his critics combined have done. It’s like people dismiss the value of 30 million Americans suddenly having accessibility to health care as insignificant. An excerpt from the West piece:

“I ask him if he is hopeful that a second term for Obama will be more fruitful, once freed from the political tyranny of re-election to the White House. He is not optimistic. ‘I think at this point he’s obsessed with being on Mount Rushmore, he wants to be a great figure in the pantheon of American presidents.’ he says.

Obama, West believes, has not been willing to listen and evolve – he should have been listening to progressive economists such as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Sylvia Ann Hewlett – in the way that Abraham Lincoln listened and changed his views on slavery. ‘If you’re thinking about Mount Rushmore, you’re thinking about your legacy, your legacy, your legacy. Puh-lease.’

I suggest that part of the reason so many have been disappointed with Obama is that their expectations were unattainably high, and also because his supporters, especially liberals, projected their hopes on to him with little regard for his innate pragmatism. West admits this but says Obama is partly to blame. ‘When you mobilize the legacy of Martin [Luther] King and put a bust of Martin King in the Oval Office, people elevate their hopes. Martin King is not just every brother,’ he says. ‘It’s like a novelist being obsessed with Tolstoy or Proust and then he ends up writing short stories that can barely get into some middlebrow magazine. Hey, you got our hopes up man! I was expecting Proust or Tolstoy, instead it would barely get in Newsweek.‘”